Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans – 27

This striking image encapsulates the episode pretty nicely: Hash (or Hush) wants to be able to do what Mika can do, and what what his “older brother” couldn’t do back in the slums. He is at the head of the new recruits who have heard tales of Tekkadan and seek greatness—and purpose—in this new Mars, but haven’t escaped their past.

We also check in on Tekkadan’s Earth Branch in Edmonton, where Takaki lives with his sister Fuka and takes her to school. Things are still a little delicate, but Takaki will take all the stability, normalcy, and domesticity he can get. He’s an iron-blooded orphan success story; in a way, he achieved what Biscuit tried to but could not. Now that he has it, he has no qualms about paying it forward.

We jump from a meal on earth to one on Mars, where Hash makes his pitch to Yukinojo: he wants the A-V surgery. “Too old” is the cold reply, along with warmer words from Atra that Hash simply doesn’t want to hear. He’s poised to shove Atra aside, but Mika grabs his arm. And here Hash is: faced with the person he wishes to be more than anything, even at the cost of his life.

Hash seems an over-eager brat in a hurry to die—until we hear his story, and it’s a sad one. His “big bro” Builth went off to CGS looking for glory, but his A-V surgery failed, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

Hoping to make the lives of the younger kids like Hash easier, Builth’s actions had the opposite effect, and he took his own life before he could over-burden them too much. But doing so bestowed Hash with a new and potentially deadlier burden: to follow in his footsteps, but succeed where he failed.

Meanwhile, Tekkadan is going to subjugate the Dawn Horizon Corps pirates, Todo reappears (as a Very Irritating Person), and Fareed has sent the Arianrhod Fleet to Mars to join the pirate fight. Aboard is Iok (who seems put out), Julieta (who seems less crazy but no less devoted to Rustal), and…a new Masked Man.

Who the heck is this? Will he ever speak, or does he rely on the pulsing lights on his face to communicate? I’m not quite sure, but Julieta doesn’t trust him. Nor does Orga trust Fareed, but that doesn’t mean they can’t work together, at least for a time, towards a shared goal.

First off I love the new OP and ED, not as good as the first ones, but I loved the visuals, especially the young Orga, Mika, and Atra becoming friends as kids and Kudelia just around the corner.

So we see some more of the inner workings of what’s going on and see some of the conflicts that will be coming up later. We have the pirates, Dawn Horizon, of course, but that’s just the surface. There’s much more at work here. Orga and McGillis seem to be in a working relationship, not trusting each other, but one that’s mutually beneficial for them both. We have McMurdo who still seems to have another side of him that he’s not showing Tekkadan. We have an internal splintering with the Earth and Mars branches that is showing some chafing. I think that one might be the most dangerous, and with only Chad and Takaki there to look after things, it’s in a precarious position.

We have Hush and learn about his past. The more I see of him, the more I can see Hush going bad and trying to get something similar to what Ein got. He really wants to get AV surgery and its going to cost him. To find out his past and what happened to his friend, it should be obvious what the problem is with getting the surgery. And his priorities are all wrong anyway, which I think is why his friend just left him with only a “good luck”. Well, that and the fact that being in Tekkaden his story is only one of many and he seems to be determined to live in his own pity party. But, we’ll have to watch this one and see how it goes.

It was rather hilarious to see him try to hit Atra and then to see Mika take him down so coldly with only one hand. Don’t mess with Atra, I don’t care if you are part of Tekkadan. Mika will take you out!

We get to see our masked man here, and it seems that it’s really him who Rustal is getting all the info about McGillis from. I can now see this as probably being Gaelio. Perhaps Rustal’s men rescues him gave him some mechanical enhancements in order to heal him, which Gali asked for in honor of Ein. Gali while in healing, had time to stew and basically the idea of revenge consumed him and completely changed his way of thinking. Sacrificing his nobility, his honor, his old identity, he became obsessed with vengeance, and trained to become stronger and a better pilot, as well as becoming more devious, morally corrupt, throwing away any semblance of the happy go lucky guy from before. If that’s who are masked man is, then that’s the only way I can see that working.

However, that being said, I think that this would then take away any chance for McGillis in actually being any real villain in the series. He seems to be taking a backseat this time around. And this new masked guy, along with Rustal and his cronies are going to be our new villains. If this is Gaelio, then his vengeance is going to turn him into a bigger monster than the one he wishes to destroy. It’s just the way of these stories. In fact, I can see his bloodthirst for McGillis causing him to accidentally harm or even kill his own sister and anything he ever loved. But we’ll have to see.

My bet’s on Gaelio being our new masked mam/ Though he seems to be a bit towards the standard Gundam Masked Man compared to the interesting take on it they did last season for McGillis.

Hash Middy evokes that Shinn Asuka 2.0 vibes. Hopefully he will be used by the series to provide another perspective on Mika’s character.. I liked how this episode once again reminded us that the AV implant is no “awesome | superpower, but is in fact a curse on those who receives it. What happened to Hash’s “big brother” is a vivid display of what could go wrong, but even Mika is no success story for it, considering the toll it has taken on his body.. He even points out in his conversation with Kudelia that fighting inside Barbatos is all that he can do not. The final scene in the OP where Mika’s hand morphs into the hand of the Barbatos and back might also be a possible foreshadowing that he is the one following Ein’s footsteps in being slowly eaten by the AV system.